Reflections on Playboy: Bring back the ribald classics!

October 12, 2006

Bring back the ribald classics!

In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, professor Allan Bloom blamed the sexual revolution for his students’ condescension towards their ancestors. “Many think their older brothers and sisters discovered sex, as we now know it to be, in the sixties. I was impressed by students who, in a course on Rousseau’s Confessions, were astounded to learn that he had lived with a woman out of wedlock in the eighteenth century. Where could he have gotten the idea?” (p. 107-108) Where could Bloom’s students have gotten the idea that our forebears were Doris Day? From bowdlerized textbooks in government-run schools, of course. I support the complete privatization of education partly because bureaucrats have bad taste in literature. For instance, they would seldom ask high-school teachers to assign this passage from the sixteenth-century French classic by François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1990 translation by Burton Raffel, p. 34-35):

At the end of his fifth year, Gargantua was visited by his father, Grandgousier.... And Grandgousier drank a good bit, both with the boy and with his governesses, asking the latter most earnestly, among other things, if they had kept him fresh and clean. To which Gargantua replied that he had made sure that, nowhere in all the land, was there a boy cleaner than he was.

“And how do you manage that?” said Grandgousier.

“By long and careful experience,” said Gargantua, “I have invented a method for wiping my ass which is the most noble, the best, and also the simplest ever seen.”

“What is it?” asked Grandgousier.

“I’ll tell you,” said Gargantua, “right now.

“Once I wiped myself with a lady’s velvet veil, and I liked that very much, because it was so soft that it made my ass feel really good;

—and then with a lady’s hood, made of the same stuff, and it was just as good;

—and then with a man’s scarf;

—and then with an embroidered red satin veil, but the gilt came off and rolled up into all sorts of shitty balls, and they scraped half the skin off my ass—may Saint Anthony’s fire roast the ass of the goldsmith who made the thing—and the lady who wore it!

—I got over that by wiping myself with a page’s hat, handsomely plumed in Swiss style.

“Then, once when I was shitting behind some bushes, I found a March cat and wiped myself with him, but his claws scratched my whole rear end.

“I cured myself of that, next day, by wiping myself with my mother’s gloves—nicely scented with cunt flavor.

Our young scientist goes on for two more pages, then breaks the suspense by declaring “that there is no ass wiper like a fluffy goose, if you keep its head between your legs.” (With apologies to readers elsewhere in the English-speaking world, this Yankee takes nationalistic pride in the translator’s use of ass instead of arse.)

Don’t make the mistake of thinking of Rabelais as an envelope-pushing Lenny Bruce or Howard Stern of his day. Old-time literature is filled with that kind of stuff. (Or will Howard Stern be literature hundreds of years from now? I ask in earnest.) Admittedly, the scatological humor of that example is more Hustler than Playboy. But through the “Ribald Classics” section it published regularly until, I think, the early 1980s, Playboy showed that there’s plenty of sexy stuff there, too. Today’s students are missing out.

A related subsequent post:
Roman Catholicism has a sensual side

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 4:29 PM

October 12, 2006

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